He Couldn't
by knightshade
Summary: Angelus discovers something beautiful in Angel’s apartment, and then finds a way to twist it.


Title: He Couldn't  
Author: knightshade  
Rating: PG

Summary: Angelus discovers something beautiful in Angel's apartment, and then finds a way to twist it.

Author's Notes: This takes place in and around Passion as well as sometime in the middle of season 1. I've taken a bit of creative license with the drawings.

This was written for Leni's IWRY ficathon (sorry, Leni, I tried to put a link, but it keeps stripping out anything that looks even remotely like a web address).

Thanks to Moonbeam for being my partner in crime on this one. She encouraged me to do it, agreed to do it with me, and even beta read for me. Look for her story on the 7th.

**He Couldn't**

He raged around the little apartment, bringing as much chaos as he could to what had been Angel's home. Everything in it made him furious -- from the muted colors, to the delicate artwork on the walls, to the smell. It all spoke of simpering weakness. 'Sensitivity.' Bah! He swept a lamp off a nearby table and was soothed by the lovely sound of it shattering. Destruction and chaos. Those were at least comforting. He could destroy everything, make everything that touched this weak, pathetic existence pay.

He used his thick ragged nails to rip through the delicate screen in the corner, comforted by the barren threads that were left hanging in his wake. He overturned a table and snapped off one of the wooden legs. Using it like a club, he smashed vases, picture frames, and anything else that looked breakable. He pulled the cushions off the couch and ripped them open, leaving gaping wounds of feathers and foam. He yanked the books from the shelves and scattered them about the room. The thuds of their spines and the flutter of their pages suited his temper. He would have gone on reveling in the disaster around him, but a sketchbook caught his eye. That simpering fool! The only thing worse than pretty little drawings would be poetry. He would have been tempted to dust himself if there had been any poetry. At least there were some depths to which even Angel didn't sink.

He flipped through the pages of the sketchbook and wanted to gag on the saccharine images. He was about to rip the book in two when one of the pictures caught his eye. It was like all the others in its idiotic worship of beauty, but it also had an underlying darkness. There was something unintended locked away in that simple image. It had so much potential. It was so ripe for manipulation. In his quest to destroy everything about Angel, he could start here . . . with this picture.

Angelus tucked the sketchbook under his arm, and a veil of calm seduced him, quelling his burning desire to destroy. He scrounged around the apartment until he found Angel's charcoals, and then left the room with a saunter in his step.

----------------

Even the Slayer was vulnerable in her sleep. It was something no human could avoid – that time of unconsciousness when the defenses were down, and the senses rested unbidden to the world. Angel knew he shouldn't be here. He watched through the window as Buffy slept, and felt like an intruder. He _was_ an intruder, but he just couldn't stay away. He was transfixed as she turned over in her sleep, not from a nightmare, but just from the normal nighttime tensing and relaxing of muscles. He should go, but instead he found himself placing a hand on the window sash and silently pushing it up. He lithely crawled into the room, but stopped himself just inside the window, not daring to go any further. He didn't want to scare her awake. He rested on the sill instead, leaning forward. He was in the room, but not – sitting on the fence.

Angel had come with a purpose in mind, and hadn't expected to find Buffy asleep. Sometimes he forgot that even a Slayer needed time to recharge. He pulled the book of heavy paper out from beneath his coat and rested it on his knee. He had planned to ask if he could draw her. It had been a whim, and wasn't reason enough to wake her. There were too many times when he had to rouse her for some crisis for him to start waking her up for his trivial impulses too. But there she was, so peaceful. And he had the itch.

It was strange how it came upon him. He hadn't drawn at all in the years before he got his soul back. The demon had had much different, more ghastly, ways of expressing his creativity. But after he had been cursed with his soul, he had found himself walking past an art store in New York, and for some inexplicable reason, he had gone in. It was like he had been following some mysterious call that he couldn't even consciously hear. The whole process of creativity was a mystery to him. Sometimes he could go for months without looking at his pencils or even thinking about his sketchbooks, but then other times he would draw frenetically for days, filling page after page. It was yet another process of his body, or maybe his mind, that he had no control over. It came upon him, drove him to act, and then left – much like the less noble forces inside him.

So here he was. He had already invaded Buffy's space, the open invitation not withstanding, but she wouldn't care if he just sat at her window and drew her, would she? If she really didn't want him stopping by, she'd lock her window, right? Having rationalized his position, Angel flipped open the sketchbook. He found a clean page and cut a corner off one of his charcoal bricks. Buffy was lying in bed, with the sheets pulled up to her chest and clenched lightly in her hands. Her blonde hair was spilling against the pillow and her face was serene.

Angel put his charcoal to paper, and felt himself pulled in with it. Drawing had become a much more sensual experience after he became a vampire. As a young mortal man, he had lacked the patience or maturity to do anything other than give his drawings half his attention. Now they consumed him. With his heightened senses he could hear the rasp of the charcoal as it traveled along the paper. He was in tune with the ebb and flow, the pace and pressure, of his strokes. He loved the silky feel of the fine, oily powder when he used his fingers to blend it across the rough paper. He could smell the wild earthiness in the deep, black smudges and in the fresh cuts when he sharpened the bricks. The world around him disappeared and he was swallowed by the image in front of him. Space stopped, time stopped, and even the demon that raged inside him stopped. It was just his soul and the charcoal and his subject.

Angel broke everything down to its most elemental form -- basic shapes of light and dark. Once those were right, he slowly began to fill in the details. All along he watched, mesmerized as Buffy slowly appeared on the page below him. He was reconstituting her -- molding her into something he could have. The Buffy on the paper was his image, to take and keep with him.

His.

Angel stopped for a moment and stared at the real Buffy, the spell of drawing temporarily broken. He took a moment to really see her. She was not his, couldn't ever be his. Romeo and Juliet – the Vampire and the Slayer. He knew that. So why was he so taken with her? Since the first time he had seen her, sitting on the steps of her school in Los Angeles, he had been mesmerized. Why? She was just a girl, and yet she tugged at everything he was. No one had ever had that effect on him before. Oh sure, he had been obsessed with Drusilla, but that been the demon in him. A good half of that obsession had been the desire to thoroughly break something so pure. But Buffy, Buffy was the light that helped him find a purpose and she didn't even know it. She was the one who made him pull himself out of the gutters. She was the one who gave him hope, long before she even knew his name. How could anyone have that kind of effect on another? How could two people be so . . . entwined?

Buffy stirred and moaned slightly in her sleep. Angel wanted to go sit by the bed, to run a hand through her hair. He wanted to quiet her, protect her, keep her safe. She faced so many things that no one that age should even have to know about. Often he found himself worrying that the burden of being the Slayer would end up breaking her. He hoped that with the help he provided, he could somehow ease that load. Angel looked down at the sketchbook again. On the page Buffy wasn't the Slayer. She wasn't in constant danger. She was just a beautiful girl – his beautiful girl – asleep in her room.

His attention again caught by the process of creating, Angel carefully began smoothing the edges around Buffy's cheeks, and blending in sections of her hair. Then he added the delicate lines of her eyelashes. He wished he could give Buffy the drawing someday, but knew he couldn't. He knew that when he looked at it, he could see his own heart bleeding out in every smudge. He could see his soul splayed open among the chalky shadows. He felt his chest, normally still as death, clench at the thought of leaving himself so naked and open. He was afraid that the image screamed out his love for her while he, the artist, couldn't even bring himself to whisper it.

The clock on the little bedside table caught Angel's eye. It was getting close to dawn and he should be going. Almost as if on cue, Buffy sighed slightly and rolled away from him. Their sitting was over. Angel stood and felt a pang of loneliness -- Buffy didn't even know he had been there. Employing all of his vampiric stealth, he crossed the room and gently rearranged the covers for her. He smoothed her hair, took one more languid look at her soft features, and then retreated back to the window.

"Goodnight," he whispered, and impulsively blew her a kiss.

-----------------

Buffy was sitting in the library, pretending to study. She could hear Giles moving around in the stacks on the second floor. He hadn't had much to say lately. Everyone had been pretty quiet since Ms. Calendar's funeral, and Buffy had gotten used to sitting silently in the library. She didn't want Giles to be alone and, in keeping him company, she wouldn't be either.

She tried to keep her mind on the book in front of her, but slowly her gaze was drawn by her backpack – by the image she knew it contained. She had tucked the other two drawings away in the bottom of her chest. They were well hidden under the weapons, crosses, and bottles of holy water. There was no reason for Giles to ever see the horrible drawing of Ms. Calendar again, and she didn't need to see the one of her mother either. But somehow this one was different. Somehow it had crawled under her skin and was festering there. At first she couldn't figure out why. She thought that maybe it was just because it was an image of her – that she was being a self-absorbed teenager, as her mom would say – but she really didn't think that was it. There really was something about this picture that was not like the other two.

Glancing around to be sure that Giles wasn't watching her, Buffy slid the envelope out of her bag and carefully pulled the picture out. It was so perfectly drawn, so delicate. Buffy looked at the lines that carefully mapped out the features of her face. Maybe it was because her eyes were closed. The drawing of Miss Calendar had flat, dead-looking eyes that belied any feeling. But somehow Buffy thought there was more to it than that. This drawing was different than the other two because it looked so carefully rendered. The others had a roughness to them, like they were done impatiently. This picture seemed to have infinite patience and that was part of what scared her. Angelus had taken his time, had labored over it. Buffy was finally starting to get her head around the idea that he was as obsessed with her as he had been with Drusilla.

But that was only part of what scared her. Buffy touched the tip of her nail to the line that made up her jaw and, being careful not to smudge it, followed it back to her hairline. The drawing was like Angelus himself. He looked in every way like Angel, the man she loved so deeply it hurt, but it was all a sham. There was nothing of that man in his body now – he was gone. This drawing looked like it was born of love and caring, but it clearly was not. It was a clever deception like Angelus himself. And it would be her reminder. It would be a talisman against being taken in by the shell, against thinking there was anything to love underneath it. This would help her get to the point where maybe, just maybe, she could finally bring herself to kill him.

"Buffy, do you think you're up for some training?" Giles called down from the stacks.

Buffy quickly slid the coarse paper back into its envelope.

"Yep. I'm all about the training. A training fiend I am," she said, trying to sound a lot more casual than she felt. "I'll get changed and be right back."

Buffy stood and slung her bag over her shoulder, headed to the bathroom. As she paused just outside the library doors, and carefully checked down the hallway in both directions, she allowed herself to finally voice the question that had been haunting her for days. It was the thing that scared her the most about the drawing because it spoke to just how practiced Angelus was at deception.

How could a soulless monster like him create something so filled with warmth and tenderness? How could a demon create something so deeply beautiful?

How could Angelus possibly draw love?

--------------------  
-knightshade  
November 5, 2004


End file.
